Google gives 2910 results for “wretched hive of scum and villainy”.

2004 Oct 24: now “about 6,070”; a disturbing trend.

2006 May 10: now “about 76,100”

Barry Gehm:

When we were young, we were told that ‘everybody else is doing it’ was a really stupid reason to do something. Now it’s the standard reason for picking a particular software package.

I can’t get Java working under Mozilla. (sigh) I wonder how I did it once before.

From 1990 to 2001 most of my working day was spent in WordPerfect 5.1. Now every office manager says “We have to use Messy-Word because it’s the staaaandurd.”

Is it too much to ask that the standard of 2003 offer the same features and ease-of-use of an ‘obsolete’ competitor?

Yup.

Peter Stickney writes in alt.peeves:

Voice recognition will not be mature until a system can transcribe “Life is a Rock (But the Radio Rolled Me)” with 95% accuracy, in real time.

It is disturbing how much stuff, less than twenty years old, cannot be read at all by current gear.
JWZ tells a tale of software archaeology.

I went to mozilla.org to gripe about the multiple petty ways in which Mozilla 1.2.1, the “latest and greatest” stable release, is less convenient to my fingers than the much-maligned Netscape Communicator 4.79; but was put off by the helpful Bug Writing Guidelines:

. . . be sure that you’ve reproduced your bug using a build released within the past three days.

I’m not quite motivated enough (or awake enough) to install and test an alpha version. Oh well.

What am I griping about? Glad you asked – gotta fill up my blogging quota somehow. ( . . more . . )